The Lord Chief Justice addressed a letter to Monday's Timm
in which he appealed for subscriptions to the memorial which it is proposed to raise to Matthew Arnold. Our readers will find this letter reproduced in our advertising columns, so here we will only say that Lord Coleridge communicates the fact that the Government have declined to continue Mr. Arnold's literary pension to his widow and her unmarried daughter in spite of the very influentially signed petition, signed without distinction of party, which urged this course on the Government, and states that this refusal renders it necessary for Mr. Arnold's friends to take prompt action at once. The intention is to place a medallion or bust of Mr. Arnold in Westminster Abbey,—and this will not exceed, it is said, 2500,—and then to make adequate provision for Mr. Arnold's family; and finally, if after satisfying these claims it should be possible, to found at Oxford an Arnold scholarship or lectureship, with a view to promote the study of English literature. Our nineteenth-century Gray, with an intellectual range far wider than Gray's, and a more delicate genius, certainly the greatest elegiac poet of our generation, may, we hope, receive from:the English public a fitting tribute to the thrilling sweetness and transparent light of his many beautiful elegies,—whether they were elegies on poets whose immortal fame he greatly enhanced, or on faiths which he mourned only to prove that they would long survive even. the exquisite tenderness of his laments.
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